connected to sub-national groupings, tribes or clans
in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan,
locality (ma™alla) in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Just how important these are became apparent dur-
ing the Tajik civil war, when political factions
divided sharply along ma™allalines, with gender
identities serving as important distinguishing char-
acteristics. After the war, the political positioning
of the ma™allas became increasingly unequal, with
the president’s locality hogging the best posts, while
people from ma™allas that had supported the
wartime opposition, as well as non-titular nation-
alities, were disadvantaged. In Central Asia gen-
erally, pressures toward group and/or national
endogamy are growing, with access to political
posts, patronage, and other resources often depend-
ent on membership in internal groupings. In all of
this gender identities serve as cultural markers, and
have thus come to play a role at all levels of identity
politics.Bibliography
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Asia, in Central Asian Survey12:4 (1993), 531–48.Colette HarrisIran and AfghanistanA century of political and social upheavals in Iran
and Afghanistan, beginning in the late nineteenth
century, situated women at the heart of diverse
class, ethnic, national, and religious “imagined
communities.” In both countries, the link between
gender and modernity played a significant role in284 identity politics
shaping and representing the nation, women in the
nation, and various subnational identities. Neither
Iran nor Afghanistan was formally colonized, and
both countries underwent periods of indigenous
reform and revolution in the twentieth century.
During the Iranian Constitutional Revolution
(1905–11), nationalists used female images – the
daughters of Iran, wives/women of the millat
(nation), and homeland (vatan) as mother – not
only to define the concept of tajaddud(modernity),
but also to link national, sexual, and religious
boundaries. Contemporary press reports about the
trafficking of peasant Shì≠ìgirls by SunnìTurkmen
tribes and Armenians of Ashkhabad, for example,
produced a tragic context for collective ethnic and
religious grievances and led to the emergence of
new legal codes for the construction of “Iranian-
ness.” Notwithstanding women’s political partici-
pation, secular nationalists (from Muslim as well as
Armenian, Assyrian Christian, Jewish, Bahà±ì, and
Zoroastrian communities) and Islamic conserva-
tives used the concept of educated mothers and
wives to debate various visions of the constitution.
Before Afghanistan’s independence in 1919, Push-
tun political dominance over Tajiks, Uzbeks, and
Turkmens, with its emblematic tattoo on women’s
bodies and animals as private properties, strength-
ened the pre-Islamic feudal and qabìla(tribe) patri-
archal concepts of women as signifier for sexuality,
fitna(temptation), and nàmùs(honor) to enforce a
SunnìSharì≠a identity for nation. Rebelling against
King Amàn Allàh’s modern nationalist reforms,
tribal chiefs demanded he divorce the queen for her
unveiled presence at Loya Jirga assemblies and cer-
emonies. Women were caught between two oppos-
ing visions of Afghan’s nationhood: the 1926
reformist Family Law with its symbolic urban-
based modern representation of femininity and the
conservative 1928 Loya Jirga’s Nizàm-nàmeh with
its legitimization of purdah (seclusion).
The Pahlavìlegal sanction on tribal clothing and
women’s veiling was instrumental in the consolida-
tion of a unified state against Iran’s diverse tribal
and ethnic authorities (Azeris, Bakhtiaris, Gilanis,
Kurds). The newly emerged nation-state and its icon,
public women, conflicted with Iran’s “national
honor” – the familial position of women within
Sharì≠a – and created a heterogeneous concept of
nationhood, combining modern and traditional,
Iranian culture and Islam. While the modernization
of gender relations caught urban elite women
between these two visions, the modernization poli-
cies of the “Great Civilization” dislocated the tribal
productive center, the family, and turned village
women from the owners of their produce into fac-